ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Reputation and punishment sustain cooperation in the optional public goods game.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Free Riding in Healthcare Through a Game-Theoretic Lens: A Cross-Domain Narrative Review and Conceptual Synthesis.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- The impact of heterogeneous interpersonal relationships on promoting cooperation under the reputation mechanisms in public goods game.PloS one · 2025Article
- An outside individual option increases optimism and facilitates collaboration when groups form flexibly.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The coordination of collective and individual solutions in risk-resistant scenarios.The European physical journal. B · 2023Article
- Quantifying the relationship between specialisation and reputation in an online platform.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Authority or Autonomy? Exploring Interactions between Central and Peer Punishments in Risk-Resistant Scenarios.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Joint effects of voluntary participation and group selection on the evolution of altruistic punishment.PloS one · 2022Article
- Evaluating mechanisms that could support credible reputations and cooperation: cross-checking and social bonding.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Reputation and punishment sustain cooperation in the optional public goods game.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Cooperative behaviour has been extensively studied as a choice between cooperation and defection. However, the possibility to not participate is also frequently available. This type of problem can be studied through the optional public goods game. The introduction of the 'Loner' strategy' allows players to withdraw from the game, which leads to a cooperator-defector-loner cycle. While pro-social punishment can help increase cooperation, anti-social punishment-where defectors punish cooperators-causes its downfall in both experimental and theoretical studies. In this paper, we introduce social norms that allow agents to condition their behaviour to the reputation of their peers. We benchmark this with respect both to the standard optional public goods game and to the variant where all types of punishment are allowed. We find that a social norm imposing a more moderate reputational penalty for opting out than for defecting increases cooperation. When, besides reputation, punishment is also possible, the two mechanisms work synergically under all social norms that do not assign to loners a strictly worse reputation than to defectors. Under this latter set-up, the high levels of cooperation are sustained by conditional strategies, which largely reduce the use of pro-social punishment and almost completely eliminate anti-social punishment. This article is part of the theme issue 'The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling'.
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